QnAs with Carol S. Dweck. Interview by Sujata Gupta.

In a classic psychological experiment performed in the late 1960s, animals in one group could stop administered shocks by pressing a lever, whereas those in another group could not stop the shocks despite pressing the lever. Later, when the powerless animals were eventually presented with a working lever, they didn’t bother to push it. The animals had learned to be helpless. Carol S. Dweck wondered what, if anything, that experiment revealed about the human psyche. “That work inspired me to understand how humans cope with adversity and how their beliefs about adversity can affect their success,” Dweck says. “Do people assume that the situation they’re in is uncontrollable and give up, or do they continue to believe that they can have an impact on outcomes?” Over the years, Dweck—now a psychologist at Stanford University in Stanford, CA and a member of the National Academy of Sciences— has found that mindsets provide clues about why people fail or succeed in school, sports, and relationships. Her research suggests that changing mindsets could even provide a route to peace in the Middle East. In recent research, including her Inaugural Article (1), Dweck makes the case that willpower, long thought to be limited, is in fact abundant. PNAS: You have written about a gamut of issues, from why students perform better when they’re praised for effort rather than intelligence to how to reduce animosity between Palestinians and Israelis. What links these concepts? Dweck:My big question is about the power of people’s beliefs. Every one of those research areas is showing that what people believe about themselves or about the world has a tremendous impact on what they do. If students believe their intelligence is something they can develop, they’re much more risk-taking and resilient than students who believe their intelligence is fixed. If people believe that their willpower is limited they show much poorer self-control than people who believe that their willpower is a large, self-generating resource. PNAS: You’ve garnered a lot of attention for your work on ways to improve students’ academic motivation. Can you elaborate? Dweck: In the mid-1990s, we hypothesized that praising intelligence would backfire and undermine motivation and cognitive performance, but that praising the process a student engaged in would enhance motivation and learning. We carefully crafted scenarios for delivering the intelligence praise, the process praise, and a control form of praise. We randomly assigned over 400 students between the ages of 10 and 11 to the different praise groups. For the intelligence praise, we said, “Wow, that’s a really good score. You must be really smart at this.” For the process praise, we said, “Wow, that’s a really good score. You must have tried really hard.”And for the control group, we said, “Wow that’s a really good score.” Then, we crafted a series of dependent measures to look at the consequences of the different forms of praise. The results were so striking we did the study over six times to make sure they were real. We found that the students who were praised for their intelligence did not want to take on a challenging task afterward. They wanted to play it safe. When we did give them difficult problems, their confidence plummeted and they later lied about their scores. That suggested that when someone praises your intelligence, that’s what becomes valuable. You can’t admit that you’ve turned in a poor performance. PNAS: How does the Middle East fit into all this? Can you explain? Dweck: The key question is: Do people believe that human qualities are fixed or malleable? When we did the work in the Middle East, we asked, “Can conflict resolution—can the biggest of all conflicts—be illuminated with this framework?” First, we showed that when Israelis believed that groups have fixed qualities—that a group that’s evil will always be evil, a group that’s violent will always be violent—it fueled their hatred and lowered their willingness to compromise for peace. Then we trained both Israelis and Palestinians in a “growth mindset.” We explained that groups don’t really have an inherent, unchangeable nature and that group members are typically responding to their leaders or circumstances. We gave examples of how groups that might once have been considered evil or bellicose now seem quite normal. We never mentioned the groups involved in the Middle East conflict. However, when Israelis or Palestinians learned this idea, they showed lower levels of hatred toward each other and greater willingness to compromise for peace. PNAS: One of your latest lines of research focuses on beliefs about willpower. Why does this matter? Dweck: There’s a view that’s prevalent in the field that willpower is a very limited resource and that when you do anything to deplete it, like working on a strenuous task, then you won’t be able to perform another strenuous task well. What’s more, studies have shown that if you administer glucose to people, it prevents this depletion effect. So this phenomenon has been depicted as a deep-seated biological process, just part of who we are. However, we were skeptical that people would need glucose boosters all of the time just to keep thinking. What we found is that glucose boosted performance only for people who believed that willpower was limited. People who didn’t think willpower was limited didn’t show a depletion effect after a strenuous task and didn’t need sugar to keep going strong. Those people may feel fatigued, but they don’t think that means they can’t work hard. Our findings suggest that what has been viewed as a basic biological process is really a product of people’s beliefs.